WHEN COACHES SPEAK, GRAB A LIE DETECTOR

Andrew Bagnato. Andrew Bagnato is the Tribune's college football writerCHICAGO TRIBUNE

"It's better to be quotable than to be honest."--Tom Stoppard

The next time a college football coach looks me in the eye and says, "Honestly, Bags. . .," I'm going to cut him off.

"Define `honestly,' ' I'll say.

During the ensuing silence, I'll try to follow his eyes as they dart around the room, searching for someone who will jump in with a question about the long snapper.

I swear I'm going to do it. Trust me.

The requirements for covering the college football beat used to be relatively simple, making it a nice match with my intellectual gifts. One needed a familiarity with gridiron history and strategy and, more important, an ability to discern which pot contained the coffee and which contained the hot dogs in the Michigan Stadium press box.

But the last few weeks have shown that college football scribes need to be semioticians as well.

Because when it comes to twisting words, college football coaches have no rivals--aside from real-estate agents, that is.

This crossed my mind as I sat in a conference room at the University of Colorado football headquarters last week and listened to Gary Barnett's response to charges he had deceived his players at Northwestern. He bolted for Boulder two days after he sent his Wildcats an e-mail promising to lead them back to the Rose Bowl.

I don't have the full transcript of Barnett's answer, but among the doodles on my notepad is this: "I think the only deception is if you knew you were deceiving them when you were doing it."

Barnett may have been about to explain precisely how the players would know if he knew, but someone jumped in with a question about the long snapper. My first thought was "snow job," but I might have been reacting to the flurries swirling outside the window.

So perhaps the best remedy, when talking to a college football coach, is to insist on clear definitions. Or perhaps carry a big shovel.

I've long relied upon Webster's. But I'm going to have to get my mitts on a copy on the New Revised Standard Coaches Dictionary--emphasis on "revised."

Coaches don't lie. They revise.

At least that's what Barnett seemed to be saying. The e-mail was true when he sent it. Can he be blamed if it turned out to be as empty as the tables in his fabulous Evanston restaurant?

In fairness, coaches are not the only liars in this world. The pews are filled on Sunday morning with people who have broken vows. Many of those people have had to pay a heavy price for their conduct.

As for the price of Barnett's false representation to his players, I make it to be about $710,000 per year, payable by Colorado. That's about half again as much as he made at NU.

Of course, Barnett isn't the first coach whose words and deeds were separated by the length of the yardage chains. Lying has been around college football longer than the forward pass, beginning in the last century with elaborate deceptions about the eligibility of rogue "students" who would drift from team to team without enrolling anywhere.

I'm not sure why, but I'd suspect it has something to do with the hypocrisy inherent in major-college football. The NCAA will tell you that it exists to promote educational opportunities for athletes. The NCAA's most recent graduation-rates report will tell you about half the Division I-A football players don't graduate.

If the basis for major-college sports is false--and in athletics, only the so-called "Olympic movement" is a bigger lie--then it should be expected to breed falsehoods.

Sportswriter Dan Jenkins, raised in pigskin-crazed Texas, understood this. Jenkins once wrote, "College football coaches have a language of their own, one that can only be understood by sportswriters usually, apart from one or two people on an island in the Netherlands Antilles."

Lord help the recruit who is trying to decipher a coach's statements before deciding where to sign this week. A friend of mine was ready to commit to Sam Wyche at Indiana years ago, but he was troubled by reports that Wyche was planning to take off for the NFL. Wyche told him they were false.

"I signed with him, and by the end of the week he was with the Bengals," my friend recalled.

So it came as no surprise that Barnett has been trying to persuade some of his NU recruits to follow him to Colorado. Northwestern officials raised questions about the ethics, but who can blame Barnett for wanting to beef up his two-deeps?

Besides, there's much to sell in Boulder, beginning with more forgiving academic standards than those at NU. I understand that the first line on the CU application is "Pulse?"

Starry-eyed 17-year-old recruits can't always find out what's true. Nor can the most veteran reporters, although they're working harder at it. On the day Colorado announced it had hired Barnett, a Denver writer called me.

He didn't want to know about the schemes Barnett had used to bring back-to-back Big Ten titles to a longtime doormat. He wanted to know if he could trust him.

"At least as much as your last coach," I told him.

The last Buffaloes coach was Rick Neuheisel, who had told reporters after the Aloha Bowl that he foresaw a long future at Colorado. "I'm anxious to be on board for the long ride," he said.

Neuheisel often had waxed about the benefits of working near beautiful mountains. But he must have meant the Cascades, not the Flatirons. And when Neuheisel said he wanted to be "on board," he meant a flight to Seattle. Two weeks after the Aloha Bowl he took off for the University of Washington.

It's all about definitions. For more than a century, Northwestern got along nicely with the motto, "Whatsoever things are true, think on these things."

After Barnett made Northwestern cool, it's time for a revised motto: "Whatever."

Of course, by harping on the events of the last few weeks, spurned NU fans risk forgetting the great joy Barnett brought to their colorless lives in 1995.